 Review by Kareeser 
UPDATED: 36 days ago
member for 2 years, 469 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Toronto,ON
 $50 per month (12 month contract)
 about 14 days
 Bell Canada
 "Good pre-sales (went to bell store in '95), good stability, great tech support"
 "Install was a little slow (even in '95!), email goes down more often than I'd like. Throttled connections abound."
 "There is better out there. They also throttle your internet with impunity."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Update (June 13th, 2008):
My parents were talked into upgrading to Total Internet Max. However, for some reason, Bell seemed inclined on sending me a 2wire modem, despite the fact that their old STH would've handled the 7MBits with ease. I've since replaced it with a spare ST516, but they later sent me a letter demanding the STH's return, and I'm faced with a $80 fine if I don't comply. Argh!!
Update (May 30th, 2008):
The Speed Touch Home that Bell Sympatico supplied me finally kicked the bucket. I've had it replaced with a SpeedTouch 516v6, with no problems.
Sympatico's mail servers are acting up more than usual! smtp1.sympatico.ca seems to be unencrypted, but smtphm.sympatico.ca requires authentication? Or is it account-based? One thing I don't understand is this discreptancy: Our original email account is unencrypted, while a newer one is. Disturbing.
Speed solid at 4707/666, consistent with 5/800.
Changed scores to reflect their new practices.
Original Review:
Finally switched to Bell Sympatico in 1995 from Sprint Dial-up, and the speed gain was awesome... or so I thought. Dial-up speeds to rock-solid 300 kb/s... who wouldn't want that?
Also, they were giving phone filters away like candy at the Bell Store. It was awesome. 
It wasn't until last year that I realized 300 kbps was amazingly slow. Notification by a very helpful field tech on this website had my internet boosted from 300 kbps (linking directly to CO several kms away) to 4000 MBit/s (linking to remote).
Connection is stable enough. Modem was set to bridge mode because back then, home networking was a "new" thing. Consequently, if Bell was ever down, chances are, we weren't online anyway 
Had to call Bell Technical Support two or three times (not bad for 10 years' service!), and they were courteous and efficient every time. It pays to be nice to your level 1 support rep. In each case, I guess restarting the modem was the solution
The email server does go down every once in awhile. We were assigned pop6.sympatico, and smtp1.sympatico.. However, outages are only roughly 24 hours long, and don't usually last more than two-three days.
5 MB webspace... useful for hosting little sprites for forum signatures and the such, but in our day and time, with 3 MB photos and such, you can't really host anything on there anymore.
Value for money? I suppose... but I really expected better treatment from Sympatico. When the new remote was installed 100 meters from my house, I should have been informed and switched over. However, I wasn't, and that really isn't acceptable
Granted, neither me nor my parents really KNEW there was anything better than 300 Kbits/s, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't be happy to have it
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